Living the American Green

It feels like a week of big ideas here at LtAG.  People throwing around big concepts and putting our own brand of common sense/humor on the world at large.  So, from the department of Holy Sh*t comes this video: imagine the scope of what this could mean for ethanol fuels!

Algae is, apparently, the wonder plant.  It sequesters huge amounts of C02 while the whole time helpfully converting more then half of it’s cells into rich delicious vegetable oil.  Oil!  Green Gold!  Plus, according to the scientist from Valcent Products, the Algae will produce different kinds of fuel if you ask it nicely!  You can tailor the lipids being produced depending on if you want rocket fuel, jet fuel or truck diesel.  Sounds promising right?

But Wait!  Isn’t Ethanol a Dead End?

Objections to Corn Ethanol have always been focused on two major points:  One, you end up throwing more oil based fuel into the creation of the stuff then you get out of burning it and Two, it takes food from the mouths of someone.  Not always sure who’s food was being converted to fuel, but there was that big blip of “ethanol is causing an international food crisis” stories.  The acres of corn needed to create ethanol alone made it something of a Dead End technology.

Well, as far as I can tell, this Algae thing solves these problems.

Corn: 18 Gallons of Fuel yielded per acre per year. Palm: 700-800 Gallons of fuel per acre per year.  Algae, as produced in the video above, can hit 20,000 gallons of oil per acre per year.  So you can keep growing your Corn on most of the available land space, and just put the algae farms next to power plants to suck up the C02.

I’m having trouble getting statistics off people who say that this wont work for X and Y reasons.  This leaves me no choice but to be horribly optimistic:  You could throw up Algae farms like the one pictured in the above video in places no one wants to be: next to coal plants and other large producers of C02.  However, the Times was up with a story on Algae as far back as 2007.  Where are the hold ups?  If the scientist is to be believed (and we HAVE to believe him… he is wearing a white coat!) we should have been all over this years ago, but for some reason we aren’t.  And all i can find is vague concerns about cost.

So, what does this oil do?  Are we talking 1 to 1 replacement?  In some cases, yes we are:

On January 8, 2009, Continental Airlines ran the first test for the first flight of an algae-fueled jet. The test was done using a twin-engine commercial jet consuming a 50/50 blend of biofuel and normal aircraft fuel. It was the first flight by a U.S. carrier to use an alternative fuel source on this specific type of aircraft. The flight from Houston’s Bush International Airport completed a circuit over the Gulf of Mexico. The pilots on-board, executed a series of tests at 38,000 ft (11.6km), including a mid-flight engine shutdown. Larry Kellner, chief executive of Continental Airlines, said they had tested a drop-in fuel which meant that no modification to the engine was required. The fuel was praised for having a low flash point and sufficiently low freezing point, issues that have been problematic for other bio-fuels

Text cribbed from Wikipedia, but the concept is growin’ fast.  Read more about the potential as fuel here.

Who wrote this one?  TheAmericanGreen - The founding member of the American Green institute, and a New York based producer and writer hoping to make the jump from "freelancer" to "documentary producer". Read more from this author